Derivita Power User Stories: Making the "Day-to-Day" Easier

Last week, our Marketing Director, Arianna Irwin, sat down with High School Math Teacher and Derivita Power User - Amy Boom.

Amy teaches at Northridge High School as part of the Davis School District in Utah. She teaches a class called “Math For Life”, which is a course designed for students who don’t intend to apply or enter college but they still need to graduate high school with math credits. With that in mind, she revolves her instruction around real-life math scenarios that her students will see as adults. This includes “everything from ratios, taxes, and discounts at the store to financial stuff like credit cards and budgeting”. 

Amy introduced Derivita into her classroom early on. After playing around in the platform for the first time four years ago, she applied for a grant to start using it in her classroom immediately. Amy has been using Derivita ever since. Now, Davis School District currently utilizes the Derivita platform throughout their entire district. 

Watch the full video interview on YouTube here.

The Beginning:

When asked about her first impression of the platform, she says she “was super excited”. Since her class isn’t a traditional math course, other programs, courses, or books on the education market simply don’t have what she needs to support and formulate her instruction. With Derivita, Amy “can access anything from any level, at any time”. She adds, “the fact that I could create my own questions or tweak questions that already existed was a huge bonus for me. I could take what I was doing and actually match the assignment directly to how I was teaching”. 

Currently Northridge High School has 10 sections of this “Math For Life” class and all 10 are using Derivita. That’s over 200 students using the platform just this year. 

The Day-to-Day:

Bell Starts:

Amy uses Derivita throughout her daily classroom from start to end. She begins with a “Bell Start” using Derivita’s SpotCheck feature. “The great thing about [SpotCheck] is if you're using it in the same Canvas course, it's the same QR code and the same website for the kids every time - so I don't have to change my starting slide for [any of] my days”, Amy says. If one of her students is absent, they can just access the Bell Start online so they don't miss anything. She admits she wishes SpotCheck could directly connect with the Canvas Gradebook, but even without that functionality the feature fits in seamlessly with her daily instruction. 

Practice Assignments:

She then uses Derivita to create, manage, and deploy her students’ assignments. She offers her kids one or two of the same type of problem and allows them to redo the problems as many times as they need. These questions are randomized, so the students are practicing the same concept but with different variables. They are also getting instant feedback as they work through a problem or problem set, which Amy says her students really like. She makes sure that the feedback and the solution that they’re getting in Derivita matches what and how she is teaching in class. She adds, “they can keep working. It’s easy for them to use”. Derivita also allows them to ask Amy directly for help with the “help” button. She says “they start realizing the help button emails me, it doesn’t email some random person. It sends the email to me and I can respond back and give them their feedback”. 

Knowledge Checks:

After they hit a 60% accuracy rate on those practice assignments she creates a “Knowledge Check” or a quiz - still within Derivita. She utilizes the Derivita and Proctorio Lock Down capability, so the quizzes can be “proctored and timed and the kids don’t have access to everything [on their devices]”. Her students are decidedly less fans of the Lock Down browser feature. 

Grading:

Then comes the grading, which is “super easy” for Amy within the Derivita platform. She wishes there was a way that if she catches a mistake in a problem Derivita would automatically re-grade the whole assignment or individual problem. But, most of the time she says it is super easy for her to go in by hand and override certain grades or scores - especially when her students get part of a question right or didn’t finish the Knowledge Check on time. She adds, “It’s super easy for me to go in and give them [her students] that extra point and it transfers right over to Canvas, which is super nice”. 

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